Free Republic

If you’re worried that your mental powers will decline as you age, a new study offers hope that a relatively brief flurry of brain exercises can slow the mind’s deterioration. The study, whose findings were published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, involved 2,800 men and women in six American cities. All were healthy, 65 and older, and living independently. Most participants were given 10 sessions of training to improve a particular mental skill. A memory group learned strategies for remembering word lists and textual material. A reasoning group learned how to find the pattern in...

Two weeks after speaking to a sell-out Manchester crowd of more than 1,600, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama is reaping the benefits of his visit. If the Democratic primary were held today, Obama would be in a statistical dead heat with New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, according to a new Monitor poll. Last month, a Monitor poll showed Clinton trouncing her opponents, with Obama lagging 23 points behind. "I'm not surprised, because Barack Obama got five days of constant media attention in New Hampshire," said Jim Demers, a lobbyist and former Democratic lawmaker who accompanied Obama throughout the senator's New Hampshire...

Soldiers, sailors, and airmen once determined the outcome of warfare, but no longer. Today, television producers, columnists, preachers, and politicians have the pivotal role in deciding how well the West fights. This shift has deep implications. In a conventional conflict like World War II, fighting had two premises so basic, they went nearly unnoticed. The first: Conventional armed forces engage in an all-out fight for victory. The opposing sides deploy serried ranks of soldiers, lines of tanks, fleets of ships, and squadrons of aircraft. Millions of youth go to war as civilians endure privations. Strategy and intelligence matter, but the...

Australians used to speak of their “cultural cringe” – a tendency to internalize what they supposed to be the British view that all things Australian are backward and provincial. This colonial residue lingered after many decades of independent achievement. Republicans today suffer from a moral cringe which makes them internalize the Democrat view that whenever anything goes wrong Republicans are at fault. Between 1932 and 1994 the GOP was the ninety-seven pound weakling of our national politics, and Republicans retain some of the servile self-criticism they learned in those years. The latest example is the absurd Republican reaction to the...

WASHINGTON -- It was a bit startling the other morning to hear Sen. Charles Schumer of New York -- the garrulous poster boy of Democratic liberalism -- intone that New Deal Democracy is over. But also, he added just as surprisingly, so is Reagan Republicanism. Schumer, who as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is charged with leading his party's effort to retake control of the Senate in November, was in a reflective mood. He said he was looking past that critical challenge to the longer-term prospects of the party, and he didn't sound optimistic. As important as it...

CONTEMPORARY CONSERVATISM and its influence on the Republican Party was, until recently, a mystery to me. The practitioners' bludgeoning style of politics, their self-serving manipulation of the political processes, and their policies that focus narrowly on perceived self-interest -- none of this struck me as based on anything related to traditional conservatism. Rather, truth be told, today's so-called conservatives are quite radical. For more than 40 years I have considered myself a ``Goldwater conservative," and am thoroughly familiar with the movement's canon. But I can find nothing conservative about the Bush/Cheney White House, which has created a Nixon ``imperial presidency"...

Boston, Mass.—As I drove south on I-93 early Tuesday morning from New Hampshire to my Boston apartment, a preemptive crankiness egged on by visions of traffic jams dancing in my head bullied my better spirits. When the familiar mass of steel and solid red brake lights materialized, however, it was more awe-inspiring than maddening. Even by Boston standards this was epic gridlock. By the time I began weaving my way through haphazard detours to my neighborhood, it was clear something had gone more wrong than usual with the morning commute. Later I learned my mild inconvenience was another’s unspeakable tragedy:...

NORTH ANDOVER - Nearly two-dozen teachers will be laid off today after a record crowd at Town Meeting last night junked plans to establish trash fees to offset a $1.6 million budget deficit. An overflow crowd of 2,800 residents stuffed itself into the smothering heat of the high school gymnasium, auditorium, cafeteria and hallways to hear an often-contentious debate over the town budget, which must be balanced by December. Town Moderator Charles Salisbury said the crowd was the largest in Town Meeting history. At times the crowd grew raucous, booing some residents as they spoke into microphones near the front...

Conventional wisdom in political circles is that President Bush has lost the support of the “Republican base” because of his handling of several key issues, especially immigration and government spending. Many political pundits are calling on him to court the base or risk losing control of Congress. I won’t deny the polling evidence, yet my own reading of the numbers is not as pessimistic as that of many GOP insiders. And I have a wholly different perspective on what Bush should do to improve the party’s electoral outlook. While some Republicans are recommending that the president do everything possible to...

HAVERHILL — A local family whose 104-year-old farm is at risk of being taken over hopes a letter-writing campaign will help save it from the clutches of big business. Deborah Rogers-Thornton, whose family operates Rogers Spring Hill Farm in Ward Hill, has already sent letters and newspaper clippings about the farm's struggle to survive to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington. Now, she is asking for support from the public. "I'm urging people to write a letter of support, anyone whose life has been touched by our farm, whether it be strawberry picking in the summer or field trips...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Stocks stumbled Tuesday as the bond market gave signals that in the past have preceded economic slowdowns. The yield curve, the spread between the yields of short-term and long-term bonds, inverted for the first time in five years. That means short-term interest rates are higher than long-term interest rates. Investors have been watching the yield curve closely because, in the past, inverted yield curves have usually preceded a recession.

Executives at Wal-Mart are worried that Robert Greenwald’s new documentary film about the company—Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price—could become a cult hit on the order of Michael Moore’s anti-GM rant, Roger & Me. So my first piece of advice to CEO Lee Scott and his team is: Stop worrying about the movie. It’s a jeremiad—a ham-handed snore with none of the humor, craft, or story sense that made Moore’s film so engaging. The people who already hate you will love it, but nobody else will be able to sit through it. My second piece of advice is to...

HE PRINCE of Wales was at the White House last week, hoping, the Daily Telegraph reported, ''to convince President Bush of the merits of Islam . . . because he thinks the United States has been too intolerant of the religion since Sept. 11, 2001." This is a drum Prince Charles has been beating for years. In 1993, for example, he scolded those in the West who peddled ''unthinking prejudices" about Muslim culture -- for example, ''that sharia law of the Islamic world is cruel, barbaric, and unjust." Two months after 9/11, he was lambasting the American attitude toward Islam...

Did anyone see a story on the Bill Bennett quote they are all outraged over on Imus? Apparently Bennett said something about aborting black babies and reducing crime. It sounds like a pretty stupid thing to say; I wanted to read the quote in the entire context of what was said... not just the single stupid-sounding sentence.

WASHINGTON - With George W. Bush’s presidency mired in the muck of hurricanes and doubts about the war, you’d think Democrats would be bursting with energy, eagerly expecting to regain power. But, in a roomful of well-connected Democrats the other night, I was struck by how gloomy they were. They can’t stand Bush, but didn’t have much faith in their own party’s prospects. Why? Well, some of the reasons they articulated are short-term and tactical; some are purely personal; others more philosophical; and I have a few myself: Supreme divisions The president’s nomination of John Roberts was a ten strike,...

SINCE the 2004 election, there has been much soul-searching and hand-wringing, especially among Democrats, about how to "frame" political messages. The loss to George W. Bush was painful enough, but the Republicans' post-election claims of mandate, and their triumphal promises to relegate the Democrats to permanent minority status, left political liberals in a state of panic. So the minority party has been searching, some would say desperately, for the right "narrative": the best story line, metaphors, even magic words to bring back electoral success. The operative term among Democratic politicians and strategists has become "framing." How to tell the story...

As the nation's "drug czar," John Walters is supposed to be saving us from the ravages of hard drugs like heroin and cocaine. At least that was the original sales pitch for the "war on drugs" in the 1980s. But the war has evolved into largely a fight against marijuana, which no one has ever claimed is a hard drug. Walters is nonetheless committed, Ahab-like, to arresting every marijuana smoker in the country whom law enforcement can lay its hands on. It used to be that drug warriors denied that marijuana was much of a focus for them, because they...

LONDON, England -- Workers distracted by phone calls, e-mails and text messages suffer a greater loss of IQ than a person smoking marijuana, a British study shows. The constant interruptions reduce productivity and leave people feeling tired and lethargic, according to a survey carried out by TNS Research and commissioned by Hewlett Packard. The survey of 1,100 Britons showed: Almost two out three people check their electronic messages out of office hours and when on holiday Half of all workers respond to an e-mail within 60 minutes of receiving one One in five will break off from a business or...

A COUPLE of weeks ago, a panel gathered in Washington, D.C., to discuss the state of a troubled marriage: the alliance between libertarians and conservatives. Generally, the two groups have been united by their distrust of big government and their belief in the value of free markets and political liberty -- even if they have disagreed on social issues such as abortion and gay rights, where conservatives have endorsed a traditionalist approach and libertarians an individualist one. The conservative-libertarian coalition was largely responsible for Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 and the Republican victory in Congress in 1994. Yet, ever since...

A BILL To enact sections 3345.80 and 3345.81 of the Revised Code to establish the academic bill of rights for higher education. BE IT ENACTED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF OHIO: Section 1. That sections 3345.80 and 3345.81 of the Revised Code be enacted to read as follows: Sec. 3345.80. The board of trustees of each state institution of higher education, as defined in section 3345.011 of the Revised Code, and the board of trustees or other governing authority of each private institution of higher education that holds a certificate of authorization issued under section 1713.02 of...